Advantages for Top Qualifiers

Technically you can throw out FPF 2021.
The winner only got to drive the bus the first game. Last place got game choice in the remaining games for both classics and main.

Damn you Travis. Damn you!!! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Much like there seems to be a perception that driving the bus is too powerful, I perceive this isn’t the case at all and if the data was actually gathered and analyzed appropriately, it would show that winning most closely correlates to ranking vs. qualifying position regardless of the format used.

If someone has a good data set of matches showing names, who chose the game, and outcome of the match, I would be happy to conduct a proper analysis of this. Head to head data from IFPA world championships would be ideal if those have ever been entered into a spreadsheet. As @jay says, i could also take into account the qualifying position and player ratings into the analysis in order to see if game selection has an effect above and beyond those factors.

That said, the advantage of game selection is unlikely to be the same across all contexts. In high level play when most of the competitors are all very skilled, the advantage is slim. In local play when there is a high level players mixed with medium-low to medium skilled players, the advantage is much much greater. It also depends on the games in the bank. If some players have a home field advantage, game selection is massive, as they can choose their favorite games that they’ve played to death.

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I agree that for a tournament with a lot of qualifying (like PAPA was, — and I believe way back in PAPA’s history the highest seed chose both game AND order! — and the current INDISC/IFPA Open), a high qualifier should be given a lot of advantage because they earned that by being at/near the top of the standings over the course of three days of qualifying.

I really appreciated the originality (and balancing of advantage) of a couple shorter local tournaments run by @jmg in the past that gave the highest seed the game choice for only two games in a series of three playoff games: “For (at least) one out of the three games, the highest seed must not select game choice. The second highest seed is guaranteed at least [one] opportunity for game choice. Which game number this occurs on is at the discretion of the highest seed of the group …”

And although I hate the rule when I’m a high qualifier, both local leagues I play in have that very fair and appropriate rule that does not allow a player to choose the same game through the course of an entire playoffs (unless all games have already been picked by that player)

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100%

What’s the point of a long grueling qualifying if it is not helping to determine expected finishing range?

And while I’m at it - if you are going to have an event where player’s can’t “pick the same game twice” - You better well have some amazingly dialed and tuned games (which is like never for all the games). Nothing worse than getting to semi’s and finals and picking games with lazy opto interrupters, bad kickouts and dogshit superbands because thats “all thats left”. :slight_smile:

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This is why I prefer the “can’t pick the same game/bank two rounds in a row”

Can’t comment on machine selection but I looked at over 13’000 head to head games from 10 years of Finnish pinball league and found that player order doesn’t seem to matter. Over these games, player 2 won more often by a very narrow margin: 6563 vs. 6550.

You may think better players would have more advantage from going second so here’s an even more surprising find: @marble, who was our only truly world-class player, actually won a bit more often more as player 1 (252/345 vs. 253/369 as player 2).

If it’s not too much work, it would be really interesting if @haugstrup could pull this (player position vs finishing position over a single game) data from all games recorded on matchplay.

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We’re you just looking at the raw data? Depending on the format, player position is often correlated with player skill/qualifying position. For example, higher seed often plays in position 1. So even if there is an advantage for playing second, that may be washed out in the raw data. The analysis would need to account for confounding variables if you want to get an uncontaminated look at the influence of player order.

Our qualifying format was such that everyone played both positions as equally as possible, with no significant relation to seeding. It was like this all 10 seasons. Player order was predetermined for each game, the color of the cell on your spreadsheet row signalled if you were 1 or 2. Machine choice was random pick from all machines that were available upon start of match.

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I can pull data but I am not sure it’ll provide answers. It’s not unusual for the player order in Match Play to not match the actual order the games were played.

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I know my events are a mixed bag. It’s either we play in the order on the screen, or we use the order on the screen to determine game choice/player order and don’t always go back to re-arrange player order.

Ah, yeah if order and games were randomly assigned then no worry about self selection issues. It would be interesting to follow up and see if player order differences varied across machines.

I guess I’m not too surprised there wouldn’t be a noticeable difference between first and last position. The benefits of going last are mostly situational. For example, on ball 3 after player 1 has completed their ball, player 2 now knows exactly how many points are needed to win, and they can adjust their strategy if it makes sense. Otherwise, they are still just playing the same strategy and there really isn’t an advantage. Playing last also helps if you aren’t familiar with a particular game-- you can watch opponents to learn strategy or feeds. However, if everyone is already familiar with the rules or how particular games play (like in league play), it probably doesn’t matter.

@JSZ Shared their head to head data with me and I put together this analysis on player order effects by game. The TLDR is that some games skew towards maybe having a order advantage, but only a handful of them are statistically significant.

P2 advantage: Fireball 2 & Iron Man.
P1 Advantage: The Shadow, Laser Cue, Escape from the Lost World, & Pioneer.

The P2 advantages make sense. Not sure on the games with a P1 advantage. Could just be random nonsense. Anyone have a theory?

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Are these all on a single copy of the given game?

Good question – I assume the answer is “yes”, but @JSZ can confirm.

The database has 13’113 two player games played over a 10 year period at a few different collections; in general there is a good chance that more than one copy of a game is involved. Fireball II was ever played at one location (between 2016 - 2019) so I assume that was always the same machine.

What confidence measure are you ploting? 95% confidence interval?

Considering that Pioneer is a completely symmetric game with no carryover, I wonder if maybe the player 2 reels are just glitching or something? Unlike most of the other games I can’t think of any reason why player 1 would have such a large advantage on it

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yes, 95% CI

Thanks for pointing this out. This also means that we have a 5% error rate, so we’d expect at least 4 false results.